News and insight

Having recently closed the second cycle of Graduate Outcomes, we wanted to pause to reflect on the progress that has been made in the collection of this important data set. With increasing demand for online survey participation and a growing sense of respondent fatigue, we anticipated an adverse impact on the survey’s response rates. However, these fears have since been allayed by a growth in the overall response rate achieved by the close of the collection year.

Why should graduates make the time to participate in the Graduate Outcomes survey in the middle of a pandemic?

Data on the finances of higher education providers has been updated with information from 52 English providers.

Booking is now open for the 2021 Data Matters conference 26 - 27 January 2021.

Black graduates who enter higher education aged 25 or under are 2.6 percentage points less likely to report being satisfied with their career relative to White graduates in the same age group. For older graduates, the difference was even greater at approximately 9 percentage points.

At HESA, a key part of our work on Graduate Outcomes is ensuring that league tables, like the wider higher education sector, understand the Graduate Outcomes survey data and the key differences from the Destination of Leavers in Higher Education (DLHE).

Graduate Outcomes is the largest annual social survey in the UK.  Summary results released today show the activities of graduates from the 2017/18 academic year 15 months after completion of a HE course.

Annual first release of graduate outcomes data for 2017/18.

  Open data licence: CC-BY-4.0

Neha Agarwal explains the connection between the two graduate surveys and the dissimilarities which make it impossible to compare them.

HESA has published its policy for releasing data from the new Graduate Outcomes survey ahead of its first experimental Statistical Bulletin on 18 June.